“What I mean is, it’s not a matter of age. There are boys aged fifty, and men aged fifteen. It’s all in what they do, not how old they are.” He paused. “A boy messes up with a lass, and he slinks off without fixing anything. A man makes a mistake, he fixes it. He apologizes.”
“You’re sorry for what happened, then.” I remembered him last night, his hands spanning my naked back as he said not too distinctly, This wasn’t how I wanted to do this. My heart squeezed. I wasn’t sorry at all.
“I don’t regret it one bit.” His voice was even. “I’m just sorry it wasn’t—slower. Done after dinner and a date, not a fistfight and a bruised lip. That’s not how you start things with a lass you like, and I like you, Charlie. You’re smarter than any woman I know, a wee little adding machine in a black dress, and I like that. You’ve got a sharp tongue, and I like that too. You try to save everyone you meet, from your cousin and your brother to hopeless cock-ups like Gardiner and me, and I like that most of all. So I’m here to apologize. I’m here to take you to dinner. I’m here in a jacket.” Pause. “I hate jackets.”
I fought the smile spreading over my face, but I failed. He gave a smile back that was all in the crinkles around his eyes, and it made me positively weak in the knees. I cleared my throat, tugging at my striped jersey, and said, “Give me ten minutes to change.”
“Done.” He pulled the door closed. An instant later his voice floated through.
“Can you wear that black dress again?”
I didn’t say it would be much of a dinner,” he said. We leaned on the stone balustrade of an old bridge over the river Isère, a packet of sandwiches between us. Finn had bought them from a café near the Place Saint-André, and we were eating them right out of the paper wrappings. “I’m a bit skint.”
“We wouldn’t get a better view in a fancy restaurant.” A dark night full of stars, the flow of water scattered with broken moonlight, and the murmur and rush of the city around us.
“Your favorite food,” Finn said suddenly. “What is it?”
I laughed. “Why?”
“It’s something I don’t know about you. There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Miss St. Clair.” He reached out and touched a crumb on my lip, dabbing it away. “That’s what a first date is for. So: favorite food?”
“Used to be a hamburger. Onion, lettuce, dab of mustard, no cheese. But since the Rosebud here”—patting my stomach—“it’s bacon. Crispy, burned just a little. The way I’m eating, there won’t be a pig left in France by the time this baby’s born. What’s your favorite food, Mr. Kilgore?”
“Fish and chips from a proper chippy, lots of malt vinegar. Favorite color?”
I eyed his jacket, which made his hair look darker and his shoulders broader. “Blue.”
“Same here. Last book you read?”
We traded back and forth, both of us a little silly and enjoying it. Finn asked me about college and I told him about Bennington and algebra classes. I asked him how he’d gotten so good with cars and he told me about working in his uncle’s garage at age eleven. The little things, the getting-to-know-you things. Normally those conversations happened early on, before anyone got half naked in the backseat of a convertible, but we’d done it all backward.
“First thing you’d buy if you had ten thousand pounds sterling?”
“My grandmother’s pearls back. I love those pearls. You?”
“A ’46 Bentley Mark VI,” Finn said promptly. “First car made by Bentley and Rolls; it’s a beauty. Though if it’s ten thousand sterling I’ve got, maybe I could go all the way to the Ferrari 125 S. It just debuted, took six of thirteen races on the Piacenza circuit . . .”
He started telling me about the V12 engine, and it was utterly adorable. I couldn’t have told you why it was adorable—when Trevor Preston-Greene bought me a milk shake after English Lit and droned for an hour about his Chevrolet Stylemaster coup, I wanted to upend my chocolate malt over his hair. But now I stood utterly charmed as Finn told me all about the De Dion type rear suspension. “Listen to me blethering on,” he broke off finally, seeing me smile.
“Yes,” I said. “Bored to tears, here. Tell me more about the five-speed gearbox.”
“Makes car go zoom,” he said straight-faced. “Your turn to blether about something boring.”
“The Pythagorean equation,” I said, picking something easy. “A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared. That means that for all right-angled triangles, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides . . .” Finn mimed clutching his hair. “Really, now. Simple Euclidean geometry is no reason for despair!”
We both laughed, tossing our sandwich crusts down for the geese honking noisily below. Afterward we just leaned against the stones, gazing out at the water in comfortable silence. I wasn’t used to silence on dates. Girls weren’t supposed to let silence fall; you had to keep the conversation going so he wouldn’t think you were a sad sack. Be interesting! Be sparkling! Or he won’t ask you out again! But the silence now was as comfortable as the chatter.
He was the one to break it, voice thoughtful. “You think Gardiner’s right about Bordelon being in Grasse somewhere, retired and waiting to be found? Or is she half cracked?”
I hesitated, not wanting to disrupt this gentle peace with reality. “It seems like an awful long shot, but she’s been right more often than she’s been wrong.” A question of my own burst out. “What happens if we do find him? What is Eve going to do?”
“If she can prove he’s René du Malassis from Limoges who collaborated with the Nazis, informed for the Milice, and shot an employee in the back merely for petty theft, she can turn him in.” Finn dusted the last sandwich crumbs off his hands. “De Gaulle isn’t kind to profiteering killers, even elderly ones. Bordelon would face prison, especially if it can be proved his collaboration resulted in the—in what happened at Oradour-sur-Glane. He’d lose his reputation, his freedom . . .”
“Is that going to be enough for Eve?”
Finn looked at me. I looked at him.
“No,” we said at the same time, and his hand covered mine on the stone parapet of the bridge.
“We need to stop her from doing anything irrevocable, Finn.” Real life wasn’t a movie—in the real world there were consequences for revenge. Consequences like prison, and Eve might have endured Siegburg as a girl, but I didn’t think she’d survive now if she went to prison for assault or whatever they called it in France. “I’m not letting her burn up the rest of her life just to take that old bastard out.”
“But it’s her life, isn’t it?” Finn’s fingers slid inside mine, so our hands slowly interlaced. “I’ve been with Gardiner awhile now. I can understand her wanting to risk it all to make something right.”
“Killing an old man is making things right? I can’t be a party to that, even if he is a back-shooting murderer.” I shivered, partly from the terrible thought and partly because Finn’s thumb was passing back and forth along the back of my hand, leaving tingles. “We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t go off the rails.” Wasn’t that going to be a job.
“A job for tomorrow.” Finn tugged me away from the balustrade. “Promise me something, Charlie?”